Chips Ahoy! Chewy Gooey Caramel

Taste test: So, Chips Ahoy took chocolate chip cookies and added a layer of gooey caramel somewhere inside. Wow, that sounded pretty awesome to me, and the picture of the cookies with the oozing caramel looked tempting, so I bought a package. I opened it and grabbed a few cookies, finding that they were very, very soft, with almost more the feel of cookie dough than cookies. I bit into my first cookie and was eager to see the caramel in the profile of the bit cookie. As I chewed my first bite, I could feel a thin caramel layer with my tongue and could taste it, but I could't see any caramel at all in the profile of the remaining cookie — it just looked like a normal chocolate chip cookie. As I ate more cookies, the lack of any visible caramel was consistent; for most cookies, I could actually taste less caramel than on that first bite, as caramel seemed to be there only about half the time. Whatever caramel was present was far less than it showed in the picture. The soft texture was also unimpressive. What I want in a chewy cookie is a crisp outside and soft inside; this was just soft everywhere.

Getting back to the visibility of the caramel, I also tried cutting the cookies with a knife. When I did this, I could see a layer, but it was darker than caramel and looked almost like chocolate. I also tried pulling a cookie apart as it showed on the package. In that case, I could sort of see the caramel, but the amount was maybe two orders of magnitude less than it showed in the picture — and really, who pulls their cookies apart like that?

Nothing horribly wrong with these, as they were perfectly edible cookies with chocolate chips and some caramel, but as for being Gooey Caramel, not really. Very disappointing.